I returned home one evening to find Eleanor setting the table in the dining room, the kettle humming like a distant train. I slipped my hand around her wrist and asked her to pause, to sit with me for a moment, because something heavy pressed on my tongue: I want to file for divorce. She stared, a breath caught in her throat, then asked why. I had no answer; my silence cracked the air like broken glass, and the dinner never began. She shouted fragments, fell silent, shouted again, her voice rising and falling in a frantic chorus until she broke down and wept through the night. I understood the grief, yet I could offer no comfortI had fallen out of love with my wife and found my heart tangled with another woman.
With a guilty heart I handed her a papersigned settlement, promising to leave her the flat in Notting Hill and the blue Jaguar, but she tore the document to shreds and tossed the pieces out the window. She began to sob again. Guilt was the only thing that pricked me; after ten years together, the woman I had shared my life with felt suddenly alien.
Regret for the years spent under the same roof gnawed at me, and I yearned to shed the shackles and chase the genuine love that now beckoned. The next morning a folded note lay on our nightstand, outlining her conditions for the divorce: she asked me to postpone the filing for a month and, during that time, keep up the façade of a happy family for the sake of our son, Henry, who faced his upcoming exams. She added a strange requeston our wedding anniversary she had once carried her into the flat, and now she wanted me to carry her out of the bedroom each morning for the whole month.
Since Lucy entered my life, physical contact with Eleanor had dwindled to shared breakfasts, joint dinners, and sleeping at opposite ends of the bed. When I hoisted her into my arms for the first time after such a long pause, a strange flutter rose in my chest. Henrys applause dragged me back to reality; Eleanors face lit with a fleeting smile, while a dull ache settled in me. The distance from the bedroom to the dining room was barely ten metres, and as I carried her, she shut her eyes and whispered, barely audible, Dont tell Henry about the divorce until the appointed day.
On the second day the role of the cheerful husband came a little easier. Eleanor rested her head on my shoulder, and I realized how long I had stopped noticing the little features I once loved, how they had faded since the early days of our tenyear marriage. By the fourth day, lifting her, I thought of the decade she had given me. On the fifth day a tender pang rose in my chest at the vulnerability of her small, trusting body pressed against me. Each day the act of carrying her from the bedroom grew lighter.
One morning I caught her standing before her wardrobe, bewilderedher clothes now hung oversized, as if the fabric had swollen overnight. I finally noticed how thin she had become, how her shoulders seemed to slump. That explained why my burden felt lighter with each passing day. The insight struck me like a sudden blow to the solar plexus. Instinctively, I brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. She called Henry over and embraced both of us tightly. Tears rose in my throat, but I turned away; I could not, and would not, change my decision. I lifted her again and carried her out of the bedroom. She clutched my neck, and I pressed her close to my chest, as I had on the first day of our wedding.
In the final days of the agreed month, a storm of confusion swirled within me. Something shifted, something I could not name. I went to Lucy and told her I would not go through with the divorce. On the walk home I pondered how the monotony of everyday married life does not arise because love has left, but because people forget the significance each holds for the other. I veered off the path, stopped at a florist, and attached a card to a bouquet that read, I will carry you in my arms until the very last day. My breath quickened with nerves as I entered the flat. I roamed every room, heart thudding, until I found Eleanor in the bedroomshe lay still, lifeless.
For many months, while I floated on clouds of infatuation with Lucy, my wife had silently battled a grave illness. Knowing she had little time left, she summoned the last of her will to spare Henry the shock and preserve his image of me as a good father and loving husband.
